Data received from Ginga are stored in First Reduction Files
(FRFs) which mirror the telemetry stream from the satellite. The
format of these files was complex and the software used to read them
at Leicester was specific to the VMS operating system. As time moved
on this reduced the accessibility of the data for non-expert
astronomers. Therefore, the entire dataset was made available via the
WWW2 and
the software ported to the Unix operating system. The user interface
to the raw data was made possible by the creation of a
GINGAFRF database table which is a conversion of the Ginga
``kiroku'' or log sheets. However, this Ginga software is not
intended for general use as it still requires expertise to fully
exploit the data. In recognition of this, a pipeline processing of
the raw data was performed to provide quality-controlled reduced Ginga data which would be assessible to non-experts.

Two database tables have been made, GINGALAC and
GINGABGD, which contain the pointed observations of target and
(nominally empty) background fields respectively. These databases not
only provide a summary of the results of each observation, but they
also provide access to the data products. These include the FITS
spectra and lightcurves, HDS and FITS data cubes and the plots
produced during the pipeline processing (see table 1). These products
can be used either with the Ginga data analysis software or
the XANADU suite of software3. A parallel
activity was the creation of background models for the duration of the
satellite. These models are crucial to the analysis of the Ginga data as the LAC has no direct means of simultaneously
monitoring the background count rate. A number of measured and
calculated rates were used to derive the spectral background
variations with time due to particle interactions with material in the
satellite and its subsequent radioactive decay (see
section 2.4 and Hayashida et al. 1989).